Elementary Questions and M'Culloch

[Mark Killenbeck]

Richard Dougherty posted his inquiry last week about proper spellings 
might for the case M'Culloch v. Maryland and the individual who 
served as Cashier of the Baltimore branch of the Bank and was the 
named party in the litigation.  At his suggestion, I send to the list 
some information I shared with him, with the appropriate confession 
and apologies for the shameless self promotion that follows.

I recently finished the first book length treatment of M'Culloch 
(M'Culloch v. Maryland: Securing a Nation (University Press of 
Kansas, 2006)) and have a pretty good sense of what is what.  The 
official report of the decision uses the spelling M'Culloch.  Some 
have subsequently changed the apostrophe to a c, producing the often 
seen variant McCulloch.  The Court itself in turn embraced a third 
version in 1826 in Etting v. President Directors and Company of the 
Bank of the US, in which it repeatedly used the spelling M'Cullough.

All three are actually wrong.  The cashier of the Baltimore Branch of 
the Bank was one James William M'Culloh.  That is the spelling most 
often used in original source materials where M'Culloh himself would 
have had some say in how his name should be spelled.  I have reams of 
documentation for this and a lot of information about M'Culloh that 
is not generally available in Chapter 5 and the Epilogue of my 
book.  Unfortunately, the book is one of the Press's landmark law 
cases series and the format does not allow for footnotes.  But many 
of the sources are noted in the bibliographic essay at the end of the 
book and I would be happy to share details with anyone interested.

Bottom line.  If you wish to talk about the case, the correct 
spelling should probably be M'Culloch.  If it is the individual, it 
is M'Culloh.  Of course, one of M'Culloh's sons (who achieved a 
degree of fame in his own right) subsequently changed the spelling of 
his last name to McCulloch, perhaps a variant on the Jackson quote, 
such that it is a damn poor family that can think of only one way to 
spell their name.

Mark Killenbeck


************************************************
Mark R. Killenbeck
Wylie H. Davis Distinguished Professor of Law
228 Waterman Hall
University of Arkansas School of Law
Fayetteville, Arkansas    72701
479-575-4358 (direct line)
479-575-3320 (fax)